Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right VIb: Rights in Civil Society (Free Concurrence and the Sanction of Civil Rights)

 VIa: Rights in Civil Society (The Essence of Civil Society)

In civil society, governmental right and communal right have a particularly close relationship, so Rosmini decides to consider them at the same time. In order to approach the difficulty of rights in a civil society that has already been constituted, he also decides to start by looking at injustices, "in the way that the dark areas of a painting make the light areas stand out" (p. 254).

Civil society, we have already learned, is an individual subject of rights; that is, it is "a collective person, jurally equal to individual persons" (p. 255), but to consider the relevant social rights, we need to consider how civil society differs from other jural persons. In individual right, it has jural equality with every other jural person, with that jural person is a single human being or a society. But in social right, as with other societies, civil society is not the equal of other jural persons; the way Rosmini puts this is that it "has jural but not constitutive equality with all other persons" (p. 255). We find the inequality between civil society and other societies when we consider the injustices that are peculiar to it, which have to do with society, government, form of government, and individual persons associated with the form of government (cf. p. 257).

1. Injustices of society. "For example, we may think that civil society can dispose of everything as it likes, and that everything must be sacrificed to it..." (pp. 257-258). This results in "tyranny by society", when people are unaware of the bounds of civil society as a society, confined to the regulation of the modalities of rights. The injustices of society can be toward non-members -- Rosmini counts slavery as an example, since one is deliberately excluding someone from civil society in order to exercise unjust dominion over them -- or toward members -- as when the civil powers legalize excessive servitude by which citizen can oppress citizen.

2. Injustices of government. These arise when people are ignorant of the means used by civil society, or fails to recognize that civil society is jurally equal with other jural persons, or something similar. This results in "tyranny (and sometimes indolence) by government" (p. 258). The governing powers can be directed to an inappropriate end, for instance by violating the rights of other societies.

3. Injustices of the form of government. These arise when the form of govenrment is imprudent or when people go about claiming that one form of government is absolutely the best without qualification, thus trying to force everything into the same mold. This leads to "impotence, uncertainty, or even tyranny by the form of government" (p. 258). In this we are concerned with whether the powers being used are actually established for a given civil society, by way of appropriate titles and legitimate institution by a relevant authority. Ultimately everything has to traced back to what Rosmini calls autocracy, which in his sense is the foundational power by which a society governs itself.

4. Injustices due to individual persons who are part of the form of government. These are the most obvious in some ways -- people using official power arbitrarily, or selling public offices, or engaging in immoderate partisanship. This can lead to "tyranny or indolence by persons" (p. 258). In this we are concerned with whether power has been legitimately invested or used rather than abused.

These injustices are something of a many-headed hydra, but Rosmini thinks that they can all be cut off in a single stroke. There is one basic principle that, if realized in civil society, prevents the civil society from falling prey to any of these four kinds of injustices. If we return to what the authority of civil society is, we remember that its function is to regulate the modalities of rights so that they are consistent in practice with other rights. We can prevent all injustices of society, then, by preventing civil society from 'crossing the line of modality'. Then all citizens maintain their jural freedom, which in the specific context of civil society we can call civil freedom. This civil freedom is itself a protection from the other injustices. 

Thus the principle that renders civil society just is the principle of free concurrence. Every jural person, whether an individual human being or a society, can acquire any right as long as it is just in the way it acquires it. If civil society does not arbitrarily interfere with this, this is free concurrence. For instance, suppose we are a civil society and someone asks to become a citizen. There are times when we would reasonably refuse -- for instance, if they have already shown themselves to be dangerous to civil society -- but where the person requesting has the basic qualities appropriate to being a citizen and have asked in a reasonable way, free jural concurrence for the state of being a citizen involves giving them citizenship If someone is a bond-servant and they negotiate a reasonable price for their emancipation, free jural concurrence for the state of freedom requires us to back their emancipation. If someone meeting the requirements of eligibility and suitability for a given public office goes through the appropriate process, free jural concurrence for social offices involves not denying them the office. In short, we, as a civil society and all its parts, do not deny jural persons any justly constituted freedom for which they meet the necessary requirements or to which they have right by just title. We defend civil society from developing injustice against any by upholding the civil freedom of all. This, of course, will not shut down all injustices; but it will prevent civil society itself from being unjust.

There are two major forces that provide sanction for the social rights of civil society: material force, which belongs to the governing part of society, and public opinion, which belongs to the governed part of society. These powers of sanction expand and develop over time, and civil society necessarily grows and develops with them. Historically, there have been attempts by the governors of societies to use material force, of various kinds, to try to break up public opinion; this violates the rights of the governed, who have the right to use all reasonable means to develop uniformity of opinion, and is foolish in general, since the work of developing public opinion is part of how civil society develops. The government also contributes to this development, e.g., by informing the public of the facts and reasons available to it and by punishing those who maliciously spread falsehoods. But it takes some work to find the proper balance; fundamentally, the government must not interfere with free discussion and must not try to pretend that its task, as civil government, is to teach rather than just to inform and act as a check on malice. Civil society can only develop properly if both the material force and public opinion are in balance: "It will be the sacred, supreme duty of government to rule civil society according to prevalent public opinion, not according to particular theories" (p. 297). If a government rules according to prevalent public opinion, it is stable and strong, and has at least the capacity to fulfill its functions well. In the short term, imbalances cannot always be avoided; but almost everything that can dangerous disturb a society consists in an ongoing opposition, either real or imagined, between these two sanctions. Only when there is a general balance between the two can all rights be protected.

There are seven classes of governmental acts by which power is applied, and the rights to which are involved in the effectiveness of government:

(A) Direct material actions by the one with power. These are in general quite limited, and become more limited the larger society becomes.

(B) Commands given to members of society or to ministers.

(C) Acts of judicial power.

(D) Legislation. Civil society must be directed primarily by laws, not by orders, and the right to legislate is restricted to matters concerned with the end of the society and to what is consistent with moral law. And, of course, in a civil society, these ultimately mean that the legislator only imposes law to regulate the modalities of already existing rights, intervening only when jural persons in the society are unable or unwilling to agree among themselves. Penal laws must be only established as necessary, and in every case an eye should be had to the minimum punishment required to resolve the problem.

(E) Organization into social offices.

(F) Nomination to social offices. In a dominion, the master can simply appoint whomever he pleases, but in a civil society, an administrator is governed by an obligation to name to office those whome he judges to be best suited for it.

(G) Social vigilance and inspection.

All of these seven governmental powers are contained in what Rosmini calls autocratic power, that is, the fundamental power, whether held by a single person or by a body of persons, that makes possible the governance of the society. Fundamentally, the essential powers of autocracy are "supreme command, supreme judgment, supreme legislation and supreme inspection" (p. 401). They can be partly delegated, but cannot be given up without destroying the autocratic power. Other powers, including lesser versions of these, are exercised through social organs in a ministry.

And thus ends Rosmini's discussion of civil society, having covered the whole outline of it. However, he notes that there is another aspect to the philosophy of right, in that it has to connect up with the philosophy of politics, despite the fact that the two are distinct. "Justice is the object of Right, prudence the subject of Politics" (p. 403). In attempting to build a just civil society, there are many different paths that can be taken, and therefore one should aim at "that particular one which best protects justice from disturbance and more easily facilitates the progress of human happiness" (p. 404), which Rosmini calls the "regular state" of civil society. This requires two fundamental conditions: justice and balance. Justice is required for the preservation of civil society in a form that is appropriate to its ends. Balance depends on conjoining in a reasonable way goods that naturally fit together in human choices and pursuits: population and wealth (which when imbalanced disrupt the family), wealth and civil power (which, when balanced, make it so that wealth defends the right to govern and the right to govern defends wealth), civil power and material force, civil power and knowledge, knowledge and virtue. When these goods are stripped away from each other, or joined in a way discordant with each other, we get problems, consistently enough that Rosmini thinks we have here a law of politics: "Every movement or action, regular or irregular, arises from the effort made by two forces endeavouring to attain the balance they lack" (p. 414). Given justice and balance, there is a third condition for the construction of the regular state of civil society, social inequalities not arising from arbitrary choice, that is, from wealth, knowledge, and virtue. 

These three conditions so far can be summarized in terms of distribution of goods: "1. everything is distributed justly; 2. in each of the different kinds of goods, inequality is relatively distributed in a uniform way to ensure their balance; 3. the degree of inequality depends upon the indications given by the very nature of things in different nations" (p. 421). A fourth and fifth condition can be added to these, namely, that wealth, virtue, and knowledge must have a lower limit in what is required for membership of the society, and all goods must have a higher limit determined by what is necessary for virtue (the one good that has no upper limit).  When all five of these are found in a civil society, it is in its regular state and is stable and strong. It is possible to have a just society (which respects rights) that is irregular, but Rosmini thinks that societies that respect rights will usually tend toward the regular state. A key element important for actual progress in this direction is to keep a distinction between the government as deciding matters and as administering them, and attempting to direct both to justice. But again, while this has to look back to the philosophy of right, and the philosophy of right has to look forward to this regular state of civil society, this is properly a matter for politics.

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Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 6: Rights in Civil Society, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1996).

When Every Leaf Is on Its Tree

 Summer
by Christina Rossetti 

 Winter is cold-hearted,
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weather-cock
Blown every way:
Summer days for me
When every leaf is on its tree; 

 When Robin's not a beggar,
And Jenny Wren's a bride,
And larks hang singing, singing, singing,
Over the wheat-fields wide,
And anchored lilies ride,
And the pendulum spider
Swings from side to side, 

 And blue-black beetles transact business,
And gnats fly in a host,
And furry caterpillars hasten
That no time be lost,
And moths grow fat and thrive,
And ladybirds arrive. 

 Before green apples blush,
Before green nuts embrown,
Why, one day in the country
Is worth a month in town;
Is worth a day and a year
Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion
That days drone elsewhere.

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right VIa: Rights in Civil Society (The Essence of Civil Society)

 V: Rights in Domestic Society

"I now have to take in hand the most complicated, thorny, and highly litigious part of social Right, split as it is by disparate opinions and encumbered with fierce resentment, hatred, and love -- stained even by blood" (p. 4). So begins Rosmini's account of rights with respect to civil society. In order to deal with such a difficult subject properly, it is necessary to pay close attention to the foundations, and in discussing social right, those foundations are found in the nature of the society in question. Civil society is in some sense the culmination of human nature, and therefore it is the form of society we most have to struggle to perceive clearly. We start with natural theocratic society (the universal society of humankind) and domestic society; we learn about societies in the context of these. They have a simplicity to them, relatively speaking, and our familiarity with them begins early. Supernatural theocratic society is more difficult, but we have many obvious analogies to natural theocratic society and domestic society to work with, and part of it is based on revelation and therefore, at least in its basic elements, requires no deep rational reflection to reach. Civil society, on the other hand, is immensely complicated, and understanding it requires abstractions we do not use on a daily basis. To understand civil society is in some sense to begin to understand human nature itself, and that is not something for which we have much facility.

All societies have three elements: the human fellow-feeling (consentimento dell'uomo)  that unites person to person, the concept of the special society itself, and the good intended by means of that society. "These three elements are, "as it were, the beginning, the core, and the aim of society" (p. 8). All societies may be considered de facto, as actually subsisting, or de iure, in its  nature as shown by its concept. Theocratic society alone is principally de iure; it exists in ideal, de iure, and is received by human beings so as to become de facto. Domestic society and civil society contrast with this in that we develop the de facto society, and through it achieve the de iure society. The good at which theocratic society aims is union with God; that at which domestic society aims is the development of human nature. Civil society aims at a somewhat more complicated good, however. Civil society is a union of domestic societies, which need to come to agreements to reduce and prevent violations of rights due to divergences among households; thus the proximate good at which civil society aims is the peaceful co-existence of families, in which the conflicts are prevented or reduced and rights are regulated so that rights may be exercised without conflicts. That is, it aims at good order with respect to the modalities of already existing rights. Thus civil society can only arise through extensive free reflection as a result of human genius and art (cf. p. 14), and it exists specifically to further theocratic society and domestic society. The nature of civil society is often obscured by confusion of its pure social right with seignorial right; civil society is fundamentally structured by agreement rather than dominion. In particular, "Civil society is the union of a certain number of fathers who agree that the modality of the rights which are administered by them should be regulated perpetually by a single mind and a single (social) force in order to better safeguard these rights and ensure their most satisfactory use" (p. 25).

A number of different kinds of society have the aim of regulating modalities of rights, but civil society is distinguished from the others by being universal in scope; it considers all rights. This has led to considerable confusion among people who do not clearly recognize that civil society is concerned with modality of rights. Civil society is universal in authority with respect to rights, but this does not mean that it is the source of all rights. In fact, it is strictly speaking the source of no rights at all; 'civil rights' is a name we use to talk about cases where civil society has activated some latent function of already existing rights in a particular way. Civil society is universal, but it is not and cannot be totalitarian; it does not touch the substance of any right, only the way it relates to titles and to other rights. Likewise, while civil society has a sort of supremacy with regard to other societies, it cannot be the supremacy of absolutism; it is merely the most eminent society concerned with modality of rights, and regulates the relations between society and society, for the good of all societies. It is a universal coordinator, not a universal despot; it is a mediator, not a tyrant; other societies are its clients, not its slaves.

Civil society also has the feature of perpetuity. This does not mean that it cannot be dissolved, but that it is a society that has no inherent expiration; it is built to go on indefinitely. "Civil society, therefore, must regulate the modality of rights of its members universally, supremely and in perpetuity" (p. 32). These three characteristics require that civil society also have prevalent force, the ability to overcome obstacles that stand in the way of its universal, supreme, and perpetual regulation of the modality of rights. And because civil society regulates all rights so as best to preserve all rights, civil society is concerned with common good, in the sense of the good of all subjects of rights in the society. Rosmini sharply distinguishes this common good from public good, which is the good of the the civil society as a whole; confusions of the two create despotism and usurpation. However, the public good can also be an end of civil society if the public good itself aims at common good. Thus the rights of no subject of rights can be sacrificed to the public good, although, if rights are preserved, public good is to be preferred to private good. Civil society can likewise have private good as an end, if this is open to all and consistent with the rights of all.

Civil society also cannot exist without external means. These have to be provided by its members, and in such a way that all members directly or indirectly contribute to this provision of external means. Such members are the citizens. Not being a citizen does not strip you of individual, theocratic, or domestic rights, and it is possible for someone not to be a citizen of any civil society. Likewise, nothing prevents a person from being a citizen of several civil societies. And, properly speaking, in any civil society, considered simply as a civil society, the social power of any citizen, outside of the judicial part of society, should be proportionate to their contribution to the means of the society.

When heads of households combine to form civil society, they give civil society the ability to regulate the modality of rights, but this is not an exclusive thing; rather, they are agreeing to regulate such modalities in common rather than solely regulating the modality of their own rights. The authority that comes form this union of households has two forms: legislative and executive. When they exercise the legislative authority through representatives, the authority of the representatives is limited by its origin: the representatives are limited to regulating the modalities of rights for common benefit, and they can only do so to the extent and in the way that they are mandated as representatives. In practice, however, we often do not find pure civil societies; instead, civil societies are combined with an element of seignory or dominion. Those in the society who exercise this dominion should, strictly speaking, confine themselves to regulation of the modalities of rights, although due to inadequate understanding of civil society, they do not always do so.

Civil government arises when someone has title to govern. Rosmini divides these titles into two families: titles of first acquisition and titles of second acquisition. Titles of first acquisition may arise from other rights or not. The titles that arise from prior rights are:

(1) The title of absolute Being: God, as Creator, has first and absolute right, and therefore has the first title to govern civil society.

(2) The title of paternity: Regulation of modalities is already contained in the patria potestas belonging to the head of household; civil society itself is formed out of the agreement of heads of household to exercise this regulation in common.

(3) The title of seignory: "Anyone who has bond-servants, that is, persons obliged stably to his service, is clearly also the person who regulates the modality of their rights by general ordinances" (p. 81).

(4) The title of already existing right of proprietà: Landowners who have others living and working on their land gain the ability to regulate the modality of rights insofar as it concerns living and working on that land; in Egypt, for instance, the king owned all land as part of the foundation of his power to govern.

The titles of first acquisition that can be had independently of other rights may arise from unilateral action or from commission by the heads of household forming the civil society. These are essentially various forms of title of occupancy. Unilateral occupancy may be either peaceful or forced.

(5) The title of peaceful occupancy: By individual right, "everyone can take possession of an unoccupied good, provided the occupancy harms no one" (p. 89). Civil government is a good for the one exercising it and, considered in itself, beneficial for the one governed, so if everyone consents to someone exercising a civil authority that is not already taken, this is a just title. Since jural resentment -- that is, the feeling of a reasonable person that their rights are being violated, that is, that what belongs to them is being invaded, is an important sign of injured right, the lack of any jural resentment over someone taking over any part of civil governance is a good sign that it is legitimate.

(6) The title of forced occupancy: In general, no one can force others to give him the authority to regulate the modality of their rights, but political situations are immensely diverse, and so there are unusual cases in which taking over powers of civil governance by force can be just title. These are all defensive, either in self-defense or in defense of others. If you are living in a barbarian land and the barbarian start actively violating your rights, it might be that your best option is to use force to establish civil government, e.g,. to prevent a more terrible war. A case of doing it in defense of others might be if you are dealing with what Rosmini calls vices against nature, which overlap with what we call 'crimes against humanity'; your best option might in such cases be to go to war and establish civil government by right of conquest.

One can also have title to civil government by commission from the those forming the civil society; that is, you can receive it as part of a contract created by all of the heads of the household in forming the civil society.

(7) The title of occupancy by the body of the people: While Rosmini puts a great deal of emphasis on the importance of the people, he wants to head off what he sees as a major error, the idea that there is just a 'People' always already constituted with an inalienable sovereignty. In reality, "prior to the existence of civil society, a people as such has no political right; they do not form a body, exist as a collective person, have unity" (p. 106). The People are formed when the families come together in civil society in such a way as to recognize themselves as having civil power as a body. This People can then make for themselves a representative government to exercise the civil power that the People corporately occupy.

All of this, again, is talking about pure civil power. Historically, while civil society is natural to us as being necessary for the full scope of human reason and capability, recognizing what does and does not pertain to civil society itself has always been difficult, and requires a considerable degree of experience and abstraction. Thus civil power has tended to be intermingled in various ways with seignory and other kinds of power, in ways that are not very carefully distinguished. Thus, to take an example Rosmini would not have really been able to consider, the United States has pretensions to many of the features of civil society, but like all modern nation-states, when it formed it essentially to gave to Republic and the particular states most of the rights and powers of feudal and monarchical governments, which are heavily matters of seignory. Being citizens of a civil society and being subjects of a dominion are distinct things, but when we talk about citizenship, we don't disentangle them, and don't even recognize them as needing to be -- we use 'citizen' to talk perhaps even more about our being subjects in the jurisdiction of the federal government than about things that are strictly relevant to being citizens of the United States as a civil society. This is quite common. Even a country like the United Kingdom which explicitly maintains the distinction in principle -- British citizens are citizens of the realm and subjects of the Crown -- does not actually make much of an effort in practice to keep them distinct. In reality the seignorial powers and the civil powers have to be justified independently, because while combined in practice, they are different things. And one very particular distinction is that civil power is specifically for regulating the modality of rights so that they are exercised in a way harmonious with the rights of others, and is not itself the foundation or source of any right itself. If you start treating a civil government as if it had power over rights, rather than just over how our rights fit together, the society begins to degenerate into despotism. What Congress or Parliament does for you as your lord and master is very different from what it does for you as your representative and agent. Lords (other than God) do not have universal sovereign authority or unlimited scope of governance at all; civil powers do but are restricted to regulating how rights relate to each other in practice. When you try to combine them, so that you have a power trying to exercise dominion over rights on the scale of sovereign and universal civil society, you have totalitarianism.

There is another kind of title to civil power besides the titles of first acquisition, and these are the titles of second acquisition, which arise because civil power previously held by someone is transmitted to someone else. There are three ways that already existing civil power can be transmitted:

(1) The first person might both retain and communicate it. An example would be Diocletian dividing the imperial office of the Roman Empire.

(2) The first might might give it up, passing it to the one to whom he communicates it. In hereditary monarchies, it's common for some civil power to pass by inheritance at the death or abdication of the monarch to the royal heir, for instance.

(3) The first might simply retain it, so that the second receives it not as proprietà but as an instrument of the first. This is, for example, the way in which power passes to elected representatives in societies organized by popular sovereignty.

All of this is quite abstract; obviously, a full discussion of rights associated with civil society has to look at the concrete as well, since the history of civil society and how it develops plays an important role in how its structure works. I have, with limited exceptions, mostly skipped over that here. What we still need to look at are the specifics of  rights in civil societies that are already constituted.

to be continued

*****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right: Volume 6: Rights in Civil Society, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1996).

Music on My Mind

 

The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (Remastered 1999)". I only just learned today that Brian Wilson, most famous for being the musical genius behind The Beach Boys, passed away at the age of 82 on June 11. This is usually considered his masterpiece composition, an extremely catchy pop song in no definite key that broke all the conventions of pop songs and paired, among other things, the harpsichord and the accordion, and for percussion included things like plastic orange juice cups and sleigh bells and a piano with tape on its strings. Some people consider it the greatest thing ever composed specifically for the recording studio; indeed, in a sense it uses the recording studio itself as an instrument, creating sounds that could only be loosely approximated live. The band and the record company were worried that it wouldn't get any play on the radio because, despite being neither an anthem or a hymn, it repeatedly uses the word 'God'; as it happens, this turned out not to be a problem.

There's Much Afoot in Heaven and Earth This Year

 The Rainy Summer
by Alice Meynell 

There’s much afoot in heaven and earth this year;
The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon,
Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear
Height of a threatening noon. 

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,
May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud;
The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,
And strains against the cloud. 

No scents may pause within the garden-fold;
The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells;
Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold
Wild honey to cold cells.

Doctor Evangelicus

 Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. Here is a re-post from 2016, on one of the most famous legends about him, the Sermon of the Fishes.

*****

Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in about 1195, and died in Padua in 1231; he was canonized within a year of his death. He joined the Franciscan order, and soon became renowned as a homilist. His sermons, which are typically concerned with tracing concordantiae or parallels and analogies between different parts of Scripture, are the reason for his liturgical status as Doctor of the Church, but he is perhaps most famous for being the patron saint of lost articles, and the primary association of him with his preaching in the popular mind is the hagiographical legend of his preaching to the fish:

St Anthony being at one time at Rimini, where there were a great number of heretics, and wishing to lead them by the light of faith into the way of truth, preached to them for several days, and reasoned with them on the faith of Christ and on the Holy Scriptures. They not only resisted his words, but were hardened and obstinate, refusing to listen to him.

At last St Anthony, inspired by God, went down to the sea-shore, where the river runs into the sea, and having placed himself on a bank between the river and the sea, he began to speak to the fishes as if the Lord had sent him to preach to them, and said: "Listen to the word of God, O ye fishes of the sea and of the river, seeing that the faithless heretics refuse to do so."

No sooner had he spoken these words than suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood, that never before had so many been seen in the sea or the river. All kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, where the water was deeper, the largest.

When they had placed themselves in this order, St Anthony began to preach to them most solemnly, saying: "My brothers the fishes, you are bound, as much as is in your power, to return thanks to your Creator, who has given you so noble an element for your dwelling; for you have at your choice both sweet water and salt; you have many places of refuge from the tempest; you have likewise a pure and transparent element for your nourishment. God, your bountiful and kind Creator, when he made you, ordered you to increase and multiply, and gave you his blessing. In the universal deluge, all other creatures perished; you alone did God preserve from all harm. He has given you fins to enable you to go where you will. To you was it granted, according to the commandment of God, to keep the prophet Jonas, and after three days to throw him safe and sound on dry land. You it was who gave the tribute-money to our Saviour Jesus Christ, when, through his poverty, he had not wherewith to pay. By a singular mystery you were the nourishment of the eternal King, Jesus Christ, before and after his resurrection. Because of all these things you are bound to praise and bless the Lord, who has given you blessings so many and so much greater than to other creatures."

At these words the fish began to open their mouths, and bow their heads, endeavouring as much as was in their power to express their reverence and show forth their praise. St Anthony, seeing the reverence of the fish towards their Creator, rejoiced greatly in spirit, and said with a loud voice: "Blessed be the eternal God; for the fishes of the sea honour him more than men without faith, and animals without reason listen to his word with greater attention than sinful heretics."

And whilst St Anthony was preaching, the number of fishes increased, and none of them left the place that he had chosen. And the people of the city hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it. With them also came the heretics of whom we have spoken above, who, seeing so wonderful and manifest a miracle, were touched in their hearts; and threw themselves at the feet of St Anthony to hear his words. The saint then began to expound to them the Catholic faith. He preached so eloquently, that all those heretics were converted, and returned to the true faith of Christ; the faithful also were filled with joy, and greatly comforted, being strengthened in the faith. After this St Anthony sent away the fishes, with the blessing of God; and they all departed, rejoicing as they went, and the people returned to the city.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Part I, Chapter XL.

Because of the tale, Anthony is often pictured with fish: a reminder that the gospel must be proclaimed even if there is no one to hear but the fish.

Dashed Off XIV

 hylomeric quasi-substances
(1) supersubstantial systems (society, ecosystem, cosmos)
(2) subsubstantial aggregates

Systems are unified in terms of the relation of the whole system to substance.

taste and emotional interpretants

emotional interpretant
Diamond: sense-of
True: actual feel
Box: taste qua perception (perceptive taste)
energetic interpretant
-- theoretical
-- -- Diamond: judgment
-- -- True: judging
-- -- Box: judicative taste
-- practical
-- -- Diamond: endeavor/tendency
-- -- True: trial
-- -- Box: practical hope

the differences of signs in each category of being

The category of habitus presupposes all the other categories.

In definitions of sign which have the structure of 'something signifying something to something', the 'to something' is often ambiguous -- the to-ness is sometimes treated as purely cognitive and sometimes as causally determinative (cf. Peirce's 'determining the interpretant to conformity with the object').

In creation, God extrinsically constitutes Himself as an object, e.g., as Lord.

waiting, assessing, and contextualizing interpretants

the existence of a cosmos as a presupposition of nomological necessity

It is an essential part of being a human person to have the potential to become a human person.

precedent for imitation vs precedent for extrapolation

successful idealization as a sign of final causes

Truth does not lie in a mean, but reasonableness does.

One thing is needed in a church, absolutely speaking, and that is Christ; and a church succeeds best when it most truly -- not necessarily most comfortably -- guides to Christ.

subsidiarity as aiding citizens in developing political prudence (Budziszewksi)

In creating the world, God creates it not only in its being and its order, but in its moral, jural, and sacral status, as with Him, under Him, and about Him. The created world has functionality and function with respect to its Lord and Creator.

Reading of historical texts is always an attempt at co-reading of some kind -- with the author, or the original audience, or the traditionary audience, or one's contemporaries

All evidence we have indicates that the 'Johannine Community' or the 'Markan Community' are diffuse, corresponding and often traveling, dynamic personal networks rather than geographically constrained communities.

Mark's translations indicate that it is a bridging text across different communities (differing, e.g., by at least principal language).

Petros as moral, jural, and sacral office and title

'beloved son' in Mark: Mk 1:11 (Baptism), Mk 9:7 (Transfiguration), Mk 12:6 (Parable of Talents)
'God's son': Mark 1:1 (Opening of Gospel), Mk 3:11 (impure spirit), Mk 5:7 (demoniac), Mk 15:29 (Centurion's Exclamation); cf. Mk 14:61-62, 'the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One' (High Priest's Interrogation)
'the Holy One of God': Mk 1:24 (impure spirit)
'Son of Man': (1) role clarifications (authority, Lord, Servant): Mk 2:10 (Healing of Paralytic), Mk 2:28 (Lord of Sabbath), Mk 10:45 (not to be served but to serve); (2) Prophetic Predictions: Mk 8:31 (prediction of Passion), Mk 8:38 (shame of Son of Man), Mk 9:9,12 (Transfiguration -- prediction of Passion and Resurrection), Mk 9:31 (Prediction of Betrayal), Mk 10:33 (prediction of Betrayal, Death, and Resurrection), Mk 13;26 (coming in clouds), Mk 14:21 (sop), Mk 14:41-42 (Son of Man betrayed), Mk 14:62 (right hand and coming in clouds)
'Christ': Mk 1:1 (Opening of Gospel), Mk 8:29 (Confession of Peter), Mk9:41 (cup of water), Mk 12:35 (Is Christ the Son of David or David's Lord?), Mk 14:61-62 (High Priest's Interrogation), Mk 15:32 (mockery of priests)
Mark puts 'Son of David' and 'King of the Jews' into a state of ambiguity

Mk 1:1 -- The author regards Jesus as Christ.
Mk 8:29 -- The disciples regard Jesus as Christ.
Mk 9:41 -- Jesus implicitly identifies Himself as Christ.
Mk 14:62 -- Jesus explicitly identifies Himself as Christ.
Mk 15:32 -- Priests and scribes regard Jesus as having claimed to be Christ.

The phenomenal expresses and symbolizes the noumenal.

'the right hand of the Father' as a moral, jural, and liturgical office

If we use Daniel 7:13 to interpret Mark's 'Son of Man', we have to take the latter as a short form of 'One like/as a son of man' (hos huios anthropou).

Patience is handmaiden to prudence.

Mark explicitly links the interpretation of the walking on water to the miracle of the loaves (Mk 6:52).

the cry from the cross in Mark as part of the Gospel's arc of interpreting the 'Son of David' title

Even fools carry a wisdom beyond their capacity.

For X to resist Y in a strict and proper sense requires that X and Y both act and Y have some sort of passive capacity. (Mutual interaction is required for resistance.)

"Since God became Man, all human attempts to create gods in the image of man or mankind in the image of God, have appeared comically prosaic, doomed to signal failure." Sigrid Undset

For Christ is a sewing-needle
and He pulls a Spirit-thread
that stitches in and out
through the living and the dead.

Many political views founder on a refusal to recognize one of two counterbalancing truths: tribal loyalties are inadequate to man as a civil being and sometimes tribal leaders are absolutely necessary for survival or resistance to evil.

Irenaeus has a text with Acts 8:37 (Adv Haer Bk 3, ch. 12, sect. 8).

Language as the expression of spiritual perception and judgment.

the Erotes
Eros: desire-love
Anteros: return of love
Himeros: love without return
Pothos: intoxicating yearning
[Phthonos: jealousy]
Hymen: marriage
Hermaphroditus: union

That is graceful which blooms with shining joy.

In the fullness of love, one experiences the seasons of blossom, growth, and harvest simultaneously; it is this feature that most suggests the timelessness of eternity.

The problem with reading Mark as having a 'low Christology' is that the consistent theme of Mark is that everyone underestimates and underplays what Jesus is, even when right.

"In the Memra the redemption will be found." Targum Zech. 12.5

Markan Christology is primarily a negative Christology, i.e., a Christology by remotion.

"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is hard." Clausewitz

Kant's natural purposes & the 'sense of cosmos', i.e,. the experience of the world as an order

intrinsic and extrinsic intelligibility

Human purposes are such that we recognize that they presuppose a greater system of purposes, which makes it possible for them to be and to be fulfilled.

From the fact that somethingis in a domain, we can directly conclude that it ought to be appropriately considered in study of that domain.

Oughts are required means to posited ends.

genius/ingenium as a symbol of moral endowments

We are capable of analogizing the universe to a machine or a to an organism only because we already recognize it as an ordered system; and therefore the latter does not derive from the analogies.

Classifiability presupposes stable manifestation.

objective purposiveness as presupposing objective expressiveness

variables that only take ranges of values, not particular values

invariance across all means of measurement

Time is the mathematizability of change relative to other changes.

The only direction of time is the order of before and after, and this is a measurement of incompleteness of change by counting. Without an account of completeness of change, no temporal measurement is possible.

There is no reason to think that temporal measurements can only have one direction; i.e., we have no reason to reject the idea that you can have temporal measurements that are related by a kind of rotation, i.e., befores and afters not related to each other purely by before and after.

the social ontology of play objects

"Play is a way of making an object, for present and personal purposes, *what it might be*; and being for 'personal purposes', it takes on, in a great variety of cases, personal form." J. M. Baldwin

myth as communal intuition

A closed shape one in which every toward-boundary is an away-from boundary and vice versa. (? -- this needs specification for complicated (jagged) boundaries)

argument by organized accumulation of signs

subjective, respective, objective

A faculty is a natural power susceptible of use by will.

"If two physicists A and B agree to discuss a physical experiment, their agreement implies that they admit, in some sense, a common world in which the experiment is supposed to take place." A. A. Robb

reciprocity as a general regulative principle of human rights

A state is always limited in what it can 'know', i.e., in the information its apparatus can process. But proposed policies often fail to take this into account. There is perhaps a need for a 'critical epistemology for the state'.

better-not permissions

When nations do not use weapons, and in particular allow them to be banned for use in war, this is always because they are seen as being of little tactical use or as being of negative strategic or operational value given the nation's particular military structure. Nations ban weapons for themselves for which they no long have definite use. And jsut as large corporations lobby for regulations thatye rather than their competitors can easily accommodate, so teh bans are generally for limiting the options and creating hurdles for otehr nations. The West, for instance, supports restriction of certain weapons so that enforcement mechanisms for apparent violations can be used to keep other nations in line. It also forces other, less wealthy nations, either to defer in military matters or use more expensive options rather than trying to use tactics and strategies with cheaper means.

The tendency of post-medieval nations is to develop systems that, while more consistently effective, are also massively more expensive in time, money, and effort to maintain and sustain.

Actuality is known by the fact that it perfects the intellect.